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Thursday, September 18, 2014

Pythons and the Land - The Bangladesh Python Project Part IV --Guest Post--

By Jon HakimMake sure to start at Part I.“Snake call!It's the python.Are you up?We got a call for the python.”

The words were almost the same, but I woke up to see that
Caesar's face held a grimace.The
call he feared had come.

Let's back up to the night before.

In the last post I left you in a moment of triumph.Kanai had led four of us right to our
target species and a fantastic snake-eating-snake scene.

But while we were enjoying the successful hunt, Caesar and Swapon were out with other team members, radiotracking the pythons and tortoises. Everything was going fine until they began to track Chaity, a nearly 9' male who in recent weeks had begun moving towards Radhanagar Village. Tonight the radio signals led the team even closer in the village's
direction.And every time they
stepped nearer to the village, the beeps got louder...until they tracked Chaity
to a spot right behind someone's home.

Here was the dilemma.The primary purpose of Caesar's radio-tracking study is to gain a better
understanding of python biology, especially their home ranges and activity over
time.The worse thing he could do
to interfere with the study results would be to move the pythons.But here was the python practically on
the doorsteps of someone's home, where little good could happen.Do you capture and relocate the python,
thereby interfering with the study, or do you let the python keep doing its
thing?Do you risk the likely
result that it will encounter the villagers?Caesar and the tracking team chose to leave the python there
and returned to the dorm that night with worried looks on their faces.

It's not like this hadn't happened before.Back in March, big Asha was caught by
irate villagers with a duck in her belly and four dead ducks lying around (her
predator instinct was so strong that she killed ducks faster than she could eat
them).It had taken an effort to
pacify the local villagers, who blamed Caesar for the duck losses because the
python was “his” python.In the
end, the forest department agreed under pressure to reimburse the villager for
his ducks.But he didn't exactly
walk away happy.Caesar relocated
Asha about 1.5 km from the village she had invaded, forcing him to start a new
set of data points from scratch.And month-by-month, Asha seemed to be moving closer to the village
again.But she still had a ways to
go when the team tracked Chaity to the verge of the very same village.

Fast forward to today.

Caesar had received the snake call just after dawn.Sure enough, a python had gotten into the
ducks...again.Caesar, Swapon, and
I jumped in a car and went to check it out.Before we even reached Radhanagar Village we were met on the
road by an angry crowd with a large bag.They thrust the bag at us.

Sure enough, it was Chaity.The young male python, surprisingly, was unharmed.The same could not be said for the
duck, whichthe villagers also helpfully placed
in the bag for us.

The man who gave us the bag went off on Caesar and Swapon in
Bangla.Low and behold, it was the
same man whose ducks had been taken by Asha the previous time!I asked Caesar what the man was
saying.Caesar
couldn't maintain a straight face as he translated for me:

“He's saying that it's our fault the pythons are coming to the village.He says that we put the radio
transmitters inside of them, and now they want to go to the village.He's not making any sense at all.I tried to explain to him, but he was
angry and wouldn't listen.”

As we returned to the dorm with Chaity to do a health check and new measurements (he stretched out to 8'11”, showing nearly a foot of growth since October), Caesar went back and forth over his options. They weren't particularly good.

Do you leave the python until the last possible second,
or do you proactively relocate it whenever it gets too close to a village?Relocating the python interferes with
the home range data and displaces the python from its territory, but if the
python takes prey from the village, then someone is going to catch it and force
the relocation anyway.

Do you reimburse the villagers every time a python takes
a duck, or do you work out some other long-term solution with them?Reimbursing the villagers may help keep
them from seeing the pythons' meals as a negative impact on their bottom line,
but it also reinforces the notion that their ducks belong there and the python
doesn't.

Do you tell the villagers that this is the natural
behavior of the python and convince them to find a way to coexist with typical
python behavior, or do you try to find a way for pythons to exist within the
villagers' current framework?It's possible that asking the villagers to switch from ducks to chickens
would be an effective compromise – ducks frequent the water where the pythons
prefer to hunt, and chickens tend to stay out in the clearings that the pythons
avoid.But would the villagers
agree to such a life change, and would it even work if they did?

Behind these practical questions are deeper ones. Can major predators like pythons still survive in parks like Lawachara? The big cats, wolves, and wild dogs are already gone. The largest terrestrial predators left are a few pythons, the rare king cobra, jackals, and occasional small cats which may not be permanent residents. Is it possible that there's just not enough space preserved here for predators and people to get along? That's the greatest question that Caesar has to answer – whether or not there is enough land in Lawachara for these incredible creatures. How much land does a python need?

After 9 days in Lawachara, our team shifted to the other
side of Bangladesh for a fantastic 3.5 day trip to the Bangladesh Sundarbans (you can read about that trip here).The time we had spent with Caesar,
Rashid, Animesh, and the people and animals of Lawachara made a lasting impact
on us.Dean Lambert has considered
returning to Bangladesh in December to help CARiNAM with a Saltwater Crocodile (Crocodylus
porosus) survey, the first such survey in the Sundarbans.

I am planning to return to Lawachara next monsoon to do an intensive month of survey work alongside Caesar, especially focusing on frogs, caecilians, and fossorial snakes.

Scott Trageser and Ash Wisco will come back to Bangladesh with another team next year, to again lend more funding and manpower to Caesar's work. (Queries about the trip should go to Scott Trageser) Some of us also hope to again join Animesh in his village next to the swamp forest and spend some days with him and his frogs.

But we all know that the ongoing survival of the plants and
animals of Bangladesh, like the ongoing survival of all ecosystems, depends not
on the scientists who study them but on the men and women who live alongside
them.There are 160 million people
in Bangladesh today.It is not an
easy place to live.When I think
of those people, I think of the miles and miles of rolling hills I saw covered
in tea plantation, and I wonder who brought the tea there and who buys it.I think of the garment factories
that we passed on the highway on the way to the forest, and I wonder how the
workers inside those factories live, and who buys those clothes and how much
they pay for them.I think of the
old ships brought to their coastline to be torn apart for scrap, and I wonder
what toxins were left inside and what impact the toxins and other hazards will
have on the boys who tear the ships apart, not to mention the ecosystems the
chemicals leach into.

In a nation
as small and highly populated as Bangladesh, with as little true resource
regulation as Bangladesh, the only reason any natural areas survive at all is
because the people live in poverty, with only a tiny amount of land and
resources taken up by each one.I
think about how much the other side of the world is profiting off their
poverty, and doubt that the situation is the least bit sustainable.

The questions of 1st-world consumption based on 3rd-world
production, of wealthy nations who consume far too much and impoverished
nations who have far too many consuming, and of wild spaces that get further
and further encroached on every year, are extremely difficult ones.Our two weeks in Lawachara National
Park gave us a glimpse into the lives of the people and the wildlife there, and
a strong impression of how vital it is that those questions are answered.What steps can we take to ensure that
the people and the fauna of Bangladesh will both have a productive future?I recall Leo Tolstoy's brilliant short
story on wealth and greed, “How much land does a man need?”Once we learn how much land a python
needs, will we be willing to face the question of how much land we do?

Jon Hakim got his love of snakes from his father, who frequently took him on long days in the woods herping and observing wildlife in rural Oregon. He went to school to work in biophysics, but has found his meaning in professional life as a science teacher and community development worker. Jon has worked extensively in citizen science with the North American Field Herping Association, and the Herpetological Education and Research Project”. He currently lives in a slum in India with his wife Rose, learning Hindi, teaching kids to read, and herping whenever he can. You can read his field guide and herping adventures with Thailand's reptiles and amphibians at Bangkok Herps.

The following papers give more
information on the snake assemblage found in Lawachara National Park.